Dev to Research: The Practitioner-to-Researcher Pathway in the AI Era

Dev to Research is a conceptual framework describing an emergent pathway where experienced software practitioners formalize domain knowledge into citable research contributions — without institutional affiliation, academic credentials, or traditional peer review. The framework identifies three phases (Documentation, Formalization, Research), maps the enabling conditions created by AI tooling and open-access infrastructure, and provides evidence through a case study of 9 DOIs produced independently in under 6 months. Dev to Research argues that the AI era has collapsed the friction between practitioner insight and research publication, creating a new category of contributor to the research commons.